Stories and facts and mysteries from my families.

About

For more than a decade I have been researching the histories of my families. My hard drive contains images, interviews, documents, charts — all, more or less, organized by type and by family and by date. I keep a family tree on Ancestry.com; also partial trees on Geni.com and MyHeritage.com. For a genealogical database I use Reunion for Mac. A cabinet in my dining room has notebooks and loose papers, a jumble of mostly the same stuff on my computer. So why add another place for genealogy, this blog?

First, I hope it gives me the opportunity to share some of it with relatives who are not interested in the kinds of minutiae I keep on paper and in my databases. Second, i hope it might attract other people researching branches of the same families, so that we can meet and share information. Finally, I hope to use it as an irregular research journal, wherein I can jot down findings, half-developed thoughts, mysteries, wild goose chases, and other adventures in my own genealogical research.

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3 thoughts on “About”

You’re thinking exactly along the lines that I was when I got started with my family history blog about 18 months ago. As well as a kind of summary research journal it has been great for discovering extended family and especially as a place for sharing photos and stories previously known only to one branch of the family or another. Have a look and see if you like the way I went about it. I’m still not sure it needed a separate image gallery but I love being able to use “pages” as against “posts” to record the latest version of the family story, and I was able to link to my Legacy family tree.
Hope it’s even half as much fun for you!

bushmaid, thank you for the comment – the first I have received. I will spend some time with your blog. I’m sure it will be able to teach me a great deal. The idea of using “pages” rather than “posts” is one thing I’ll be looking at, in particular.

Starting this blog has been more confusing and time-consuming than I had initially thought it would be, but I assume there will be less angst and more fun as I use it more.

Today I added a new post: much longer than I had planned (i’m sure my non-genealogy relatives will yawn and ignore it). But in trying to write the post I put a few things together that I hadn’t done before. Better than I have done before, I was able to structure the problem of finding the immigration records of my Levensohn family, simply by writing it out. In short, writing something helps me to organize and structure and examine my thoughts better than I can without the narrative. So I guess that this is another purpose of my new blog.